


Catalysis

by pyrrhic_victoly



Series: Tiger Got to Hunt, Bird Got to Fly [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Dubious Science, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-09 00:05:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4326027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrrhic_victoly/pseuds/pyrrhic_victoly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Haru’s last day in the Twelfth Division.  OR, two shitty people talk science and ignore feelings like the emotional dumbasses they are.</p><p>[Itou Haru is an OC who acts as a catalyst for many of the events in “Tiger Got to Hunt, Bird Got to Fly”.  It’s not necessary to read that to get this and vice versa.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catalysis

Captain Kurotsuchi gifts her with a look of disdain. It’s just one researcher in his stable of many, and this one he had long since thrown off from his more important projects. Consistently standard. Not worth convincing to stay. 

Lieutenant Kurotsuchi processes the forms with nary a change in her doll-like gaze. There’s no flicker of recognition even as she says, “Our policy states I must inform you that outbound transfers are to find employment with another division within a ten day grace period or risk being put on probationary status. Divisionless Shinigami are not allowed to remain in active service. Do you wish to proceed?”

“Yes.”

Thud! The lieutenant presses heavy seal to paper with mechanical surety. “Request granted. Please inform your lab leader if you have not done so already. A replacement will be assigned to your post within twenty-four hours.”

With that, Haru is freed. The gravity of the situation doesn’t hit her right away. She still has one last experiment to run; today’s work is not finished. Haru shuffles back down to the labs, and it’s a day like any other.

She settles into her familiar workstation. Gloves and goggles on. Yesterday’s chemical solutions are carefully brought out from the refrigeration units. Beakers, pipettes, burners. One drop of this into that. Two drops of that into those. And scribble, and record. Temperatures, volumes, precipitates. Data, data, data.

"These measurements are off. You're distracted, shitty researcher."

"They're fine, shitty boss. Your new assistant can fix them tomorrow. It'll probably be better to start over anyway."

Shitty boss is shitty as always. He complains about her work all the time, but never in all their years of working together has he requested a new assistant. For all that he works with such volatile materials, he hates change in his life.

"Not to be nosy, but why?" he asks.

"Why what?" she asks dispassionately. Facetiously.

Akon grimaces as he is made to clarify. "Why leave? I thought you loved to research."

She does. But.

If their division were an organism, it would be a sickly one, diseased and dying. The Captain's - no, Soul Society's version of science is a perversion. It's a mockery of what scientific research could and should be doing to enrich lives. So much potential, so much young talent wasted on… On what? Mostly weapons manufacturing. New ways to torture. Poisoning, paralyzing, prolonging pain. These are what interest Captain Kurotsuchi the most and they are utterly pointless, not to mention distasteful. And they are fully sanctioned by Soul Society's upper echelon - the same people who judged it to be fine that a former inmate and confirmed sociopath take control over a division of the Gotei 13.

These thoughts and the bitterness that accompany them should be beyond her by now; she’d thought she'd worked out most of the anger she'd felt after Captain Urahara's disappearance. She isn't some new recruit who's yet to encounter the horrors that lurk in the Twelfth Division. (She's met the horrors. She's also been assigned to clean their cages before.) It's just that sometimes even the most jaded of researchers think back to the youthful ideals they'd held once upon a time. No one comes into the Twelfth thinking that they're in it to cause as much suffering as possible, even if that’s what they end up doing. If maybe some of them turn twisted along the way, that's just due to the general miasma of misery and madness that hangs over the place; it's the natural result of a culture that glorifies sadism in the guise of objectivism. Years of this would be enough to turn anyone insane.

For Haru, the question now isn't why she's leaving, but why she stayed for so long. There’s a promise to a once-friend that’s she’s upheld – a promise to stay away from a certain place until a certain time. But nothing about that promise said she had to torture herself by staying in the Twelfth when her work here had lost all meaning.

She glances at the bubbling beakers and vials. "Sometimes I think I could hate it."

Akon looks displeased at that, his face tightening along the eyes and mouth. "You hate working with me so much?"

"I hate the things we do, the methods we employ. Is it so odd to think that even I, morally bankrupt as I am, would have ethical objections to the way we treat test subjects?"

He scoffs at the mention of ethics. "You've never complained before."

"You're not complaining either. Should I take that to mean you enjoy everything we’re ordered to do? Maybe I just did as I was told because I’m a lazy coward who couldn’t be bothered to find another job."

"Not buying it."

"Then maybe I just got tired of having to pretend that what we do is actually sound science."

"The science is sound."

"It's really not."

"Ethics aside, the methodology is correct."

"From the test phase onward, yes, but the hypotheses are shit half the time, and that turns the whole thing to shit as far as I'm concerned. I'm as big a fan of denial as the next guy, but it's hard to defend a hypothesis that essentially boils down to 'what will make this person scream the loudest'. What is actually achieved by measuring the volume of a prisoner's screams? Besides satisfying the captain's bloodlust, that is."

Akon is silent. He prefers actions to words, and has not had much experience battling with the latter. It’s a mystery what he thinks of things, if he has anything left in him that even remotely resembles passion. This is the closest she has been to angering him outside of botching an experiment.

Once, Haru had thought she would one day ask him what he thought of her, why he kept up their almost flirtatious banter, if he thought anything would come of it, would he _like_ anything to come of it. The opportunity never arose in the tepid decades they worked together, and eventually the urge to ask faded from her mind. She suspects that he grudgingly likes her in the way she grudgingly likes him, but they are both too broken to be made whole with each other, so why bother? Why put forth the effort to pretend to be a normal human couple when they are neither normal nor human? No, it was easier to let it all go, to let it wither and fall away.

Finally, Akon says with a shrug, "Not my problem."

“I know. That’s why you’re staying.”

If they were not who they are, perhaps fingers would have brushed and lingered as they shook, businesslike, one last time. Perhaps promises would be made and broken, kisses stolen, what-ifs explored. But they are who they are, and they are scientists. Probability is their forte, and they know without saying that it is against them. Because she is leaving and he has no time for those who cannot stay. Because they are both monsters (made, not born), both coldblooded snakes hiding in humanskin.

She’ll shed her skin. She won't miss anything from this life. 

Well, maybe Akon, but nothing else.

_Maybe._

"Take care, shitty researcher."

"You too, shitty boss."

**Author's Note:**

> Most of this was cut out from an upcoming chapter in"Tiger Got to Hunt..." because I didn't think it fit very well. I wrote it quite some time ago, IDK when... It's been sitting on my computer for at least a year... It was supposed to be one of the past segments, except I figured nobody really cares about OCs all that much unless it's about how they can further the plot and stuff, and I want the main fic to focus more on Gin.
> 
> Anyway, Haru is a pretty morally ambiguous person. The reason she stayed in the Twelfth even when doing so made her miserable is because she was (unconsciously) punishing herself for the stunt she and Gin pulled in chapter 10. She'd been living with revenge as a sole motivator (and it fucked her up in the head), so when it was all over she didn't have much in the way of "plans to live a full and happy life". Her situation worsened when the conflicting feelings of guilt and satisfaction finally caught up to her. 
> 
> (Also, here we see she continues to have shit taste in people to form emotional attachments to.)


End file.
